San Juan Symphony - American Voices
Notes on the Program

The history of American classical music is a story of talent gaining the confidence to liberate itself from European influence. American Voices is a program of music by composers who made their own personal declarations of independence. Although their families were almost invariably recent immigrants - or perhaps precisely because they were recent immigrants! -  these musical pioneers of the 30s to 50s shared many “American” qualities with earlier pioneers. They were ingenious, resourceful, original and unafraid. They progressed with a sense of purpose. They were self-made, and gave up old names, old styles and old attitudes in order to secure a place in the new world. Creston was self-taught, Bernstein self-defined, Riegger self-searching. After study in France, Copland abandoned his European style for a new popular relevance in America. Together with their many comrades, these composers defined the unique spirit of American music.

Aaron Copland is known for writing music that evokes the American pioneer spirit. His pieces sometimes quote a hoedown or a shaker hymn, but they move us for a deeper reason: they capture the innocence and beauty of the vast American landscape, and reflect the gritty determination of the people who made their way across it. A first generation Russian Jewish immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, Copland wrote wonderful city music as well, but it is the outdoor music that tugs at so many American hearts.

Aaron Copland was born in 1910 and, like many talented young American musicians of that era, found his way to study in Paris, then a teeming capital of modernist art and home to Stravinsky, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and many others. He returned with a severe, modernist compositional style that won him praise from critics and classical music connoisseurs. By the mid 1930’s, however, he abandoned the European-influenced style for a simpler musical voice. He later said “I like to think that I have touched off for myself and others a kind of musical naturalness that we have badly needed.” The deepening economic and political crises of the 30’s had probably turned the composer’s attention toward social significance and popular acceptance of his art. Musical inspirations were equally important, and in 1936 the lively sounds of a south-of-the-border dance hall found expression in Copland’s first popular success, El Salon Mexico. In 1938 this composer of “music for the people” successfully incorporated the accents of American folk music into a classical ballet, Billy the Kid. An outdoor overture was also written in 1938, for the orchestra of New York City’s High School of Music and Art. Although the title was added after the fact, the music is one of the purest examples of Copland’s unmistakable open-air style.

In 1950, Copland arranged a set of five Old American Songs for voice and piano. He gathered the tunes and texts from various sources, including the original song sheets of hymns and minstrel songs published in the first half of the 19th century. The popularity of this first set led to the publishing of a second set in 1952 and arrangements of both sets for orchestra in 1954.  Copland’s colleague, Boston composer Irving Fine further arranged the works for chorus by harmonizing and amplifying the solo vocal lines. Today’s performance combines Fine’s choral arrangements with Copland’s orchestral accompaniment. This first set of songs includes: The Boatmen’s Dance, a minstrel tune with accompaniment imitating minstrel banjo playing;  The Dodger, a satirical political song from the 1884 presidential campaign;  Long Time Ago, a nostalgic 19th century ballad;  Simple Gifts, the Shaker tune well-known from the Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring; and  I Bought Me A Cat, a lively nonsense song for children which features imitations of playful barnyard sounds in both the voices and orchestra. In his selection and arrangement of each song, Copland captured a particular part of the American character. The songs are among Copland’s best-loved works and his most characteristic expressions of Americana.

Paul Creston was born Giuseppe Guttoveggio in New York City in 1906. Entirely self-taught apart from piano and organ lessons in his youth, Creston was driven by a desire for self-improvement and pursued his own studies in theory, composition, literature and philosophy while working odd jobs to support himself and his poor immigrant family. Independent by nature, he developed his style free of any particular school of thought or teacher's influence. Rhythm became the essential building block of his work. In 1926 he found his first musical employment, as a theater organist for silent movies. Creston was later appointed organist of St. Malachy’s Church in New York, a post he held for the next thirty-three years. In 1933 he presented his work to established composer Henry Cowell, who became a life-long advocate and brought the young composer to national attention. In an era when many composers were exploring highly dissonant techniques, Creston wrote in an accessible, conservative style that later made him the most performed American composer of the 1940s.

The idea to write a work for marimba and orchestra came in the form of a commission from Frederique Petrides, the female conductor of the 30-member all-woman Orchestrette Classique in New York. The work was premiered by Ruth Stuber Jeanne on April 29, 1940 in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall, and appears to have been the first concerto ever written for the marimba. The instrument had enjoyed growing popularity in the 30’s, inspired in part by a notorious performance at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair by a 100-piece Marimba Orchestra led by Claire Musser.

The marimba is at once one of the oldest and one of the newest musical instruments. In 1949, a seven note marimba-like stone instrument was discovered in Vietnam. Estimated to be 5,000 years old, it is probably the oldest known musical instrument specimen in the world. A wooden instrument design appears to be indigenous to primitive cultures in Asia and Africa, and made its way with the slave trade to South America. The modern marimba, with chromatic keys mirroring those of the piano, was introduced in 1874 in Guatemala and is now that country’s national musical instrument.  It became popular in American dance bands in the pre-jazz era and in 1916 its little cousin, the vibraphone, was introduced in jazz bands. The marimba is distinguished from other xylophone-like instruments by the addition of a separate acoustic amplifier for each note. On the modern marimba these are large tubes that hang below the sound bars all along the instrument’s impressive ten foot length. The marimba is one of hundreds of instruments that a percussionist is called upon to play. The easily-recognized battery of European and North American symphonic instruments has been augmented in the last fifty years by numerous exotic additions from Africa and Asia.

In his Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra Creston captures the agile, sparkling character the instrument must have sported in early dance bands. Creston’s first movement is full of ragtime-like syncopations and cheeky rhythmic games. The second movement’s contrasting lyrical sound is achieved in large part through the percussionist’s use of four mallets to roll and sustain four-note chords. Seventh-chord harmonies give the music a nostalgic shimmer, and the marimba’s exotic woody resonances produce a haunting glow. The third movement returns to an even zippier tempo than the first, with more rhythmic pranks and virtuoso passages that would not be out of place accompanying the madcap scenes from a silent movie or early cartoon.

Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961) was born in Albany, NY and studied cello and composition at the Institute of Music and Art (future Juilliard School) in New York. He further studied composition in Germany with Max Bruch, among others, then worked as a conductor in Germany until the American entry into World War I forced his return to the States.

Riegger was a master craftsman, original and eclectic, and wrote in disparate styles with equal proficiency.  His musical shape shifting even led him to write under pseudonyms for certain works!  After a three-year period of artistic soul-searching during which he stopped composing, Riegger aligned himself in the late 20s with the progressive composers Ives, Cowell, Varése and Ruggles, adopting a dissonant, fiercely independent compositional language. Public and critical recognition came later, with several dance works written in a less dissonant style. In the 1930s Riegger composed music for America's most innovative dancers, including Martha Graham, José Limon and Doris Humphrey. His 3rd Symphony won a Naumburg Foundation Recording Award and was the choice of the New York Music Critics' Circle in 1948. Riegger remained in the front rank of American composers until his death in 1961.

Like Paul Creston, he is one of a number of American composers who won recognition in the 40s but whose work was eclipsed in the 50s and 60s by the especially bright stars of Copland and Bernstein. In 1958, on the occasion of conducting Riegger’s Music for Orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein praised Riegger as a pioneer of musical modernism in America, a creative artist who was "salty, peppery, crusty, unconventional and eternally young in spirit." – a truly American voice.

Dance Rhythms, composed in 1956, is an attractive, thoroughly uncomplicated essay on the benefits of daily doses of pure rhythm. The piece seems to be a good example of Riegger’s philosophy that dance and music should be equal partners. Its simple, almost reductive melodic material leaves plenty of room for choreography to be the focus, while its propulside rhythmic drive lets it stand on its own as a concert piece.

Aaron Copland composed a number of pieces for young performers.  He accepted a commission from Life magazine to compose a short piece for piano students to be published in their June 19, 1962 issue. In 1964 he orchestrated it for inclusion in a Youth Orchestra series, and Down A Country Lane eventually entered the composer’s catalogue of mature works.  It is a beautifully gentle, pastoral piece, and something of a relic from a time not fifty years ago when the study of classical music was a mainstream activity for the general public.

Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta, Candide, is based on a satire published by the French philosopher Voltaire in 1759:  Candide, ou l'Optimisme. The story presents a young man, Candide (a French word for ‘ingenuous’ or ‘naïve’) who has been taught to believe in a brand of Enlightenment optimism but becomes disillusioned after enduring extraordinary hardships during an ill-fated journey. Through Candide’s sorry adventures, Voltaire reveals the evils of religion and government, among others, pokes fun at the doctrine of Optimism and skewers many other sacred cows along the way. Biting satire and a loony imagination give the work a contemporary tone reminiscent of Saturday Night Live in the 70’s.

The operetta opened on Broadway in 1956 but was a box office failure. The book, by playwright Lillian Hellman, was widely criticized for lack of focus and a too-seriousness. Just a year later, with a different team of writers, Bernstein would prove that a serious story can become a Broadway success, but the philosophical overtones of Candide proved to be its undoing. Several revivals have been largely successful, and the effectiveness of Bernstein’s original music has never been questioned.

The Best of all Possible Worlds is a madcap lesson in faux optimism that attempts to justify various evils, including war. Its logic runs, “Once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.” It ends in a blaze of mock academic self-seriousness complete with exercises in Latin conjugations.

Make Our Garden Grow is the operetta’s finale. After his numerous trials Candide sings a deeply felt hymn to simplicity, humility and knowing oneself. The touching lyrics are by the poet Richard Wilbur:  “You’ve been a fool and so have I, But let’s be man and wife. And let us try before we die, To make some sense of life. We’re neither pure nor wise nor good; We’ll do the best we know.  We’ll build our house and chop our wood, And make our garden grow, And make our garden grow.”

West Side Story is undoubtedly the best-known and best-loved composition by an American ‘classical’ composer. At the time of its premiere in 1957, the 39 year-old Leonard Bernstein had long since established himself as the brightest star in American music. He skyrocketed to national attention on November 14, 1943, stepping onto the podium to substitute for an ailing Artur Rodzinsky and conducting the New York Philharmonic in a national radio broadcast. Within a few years he had conducted major orchestras around the globe, had had his First Symphony performed to critical praise and awards across the United States as well as in Prague, Jerusalem and Venice and, most remarkable of all, was the composer of a Broadway hit, On The Town. At the time it was unthinkable that a composer of Broadway musicals would be taken seriously by classical audiences but ‘Lennie’ was one-of-a-kind. With one foot firmly planted in each of the ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ music worlds he defined a new path that musicians are thankful to follow even today.

Bernstein was conscious of creating an new American musical idiom when he composed West Side Story along with collaborators Jerome Robbins (choreographer, director), a young Stephen Sondheim (lyricist), and Arthur Laurents (librettist).  The show was conceived by Robbins in 1949 as a contemporary retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story. West Side Story is a bleakly tragic tale, a radical departure from the cheery stuff of earlier American musicals, and opened the door to a new, more complex and realistic style of American musical theater. The show is so well-known in it’s final form that the details of its six-year evolution from Romeo and Juliet to Broadway are surprising. Originally, the action was to take place on New York's Lower East Side, with tensions flaring between Jews and Catholics during the Passover and Easter holidays. Needless to say, that setting failed to inspire even the authors and the project got shelved. Years later, Laurents proposed changing the central conflict from religion to race, and the creative process finally took off. The authors took considerable dramatic and musical risks, which were sometimes met with animosity, including the withdraw of the producer two months before the start of rehearsals. Columbia Records initially rejected the offer to record Bernstein's score, saying it was too depressing and difficult.

West Side Story transfers Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to New York in the 1950s. The love story is now that of Maria and Tony. The feud between the Capulets and Montagues is a rivalry between white and Puerto Rican teen-age gangs, the Jets and the Sharks. Shakespeare's famous balcony scene takes place on the fire-escape of an ugly New York tenement. In a climactic gang fight Tony kills Maria's brother. Maria is ready to forgive Tony but before they can reconcile Tony is killed by an avenging Shark. The dramatic material is realistic, grim and alive with social problems never before confronted on a Broadway stage.

Part of the show’s great impact was the sheer physical presence of the actors. For the first five minutes not a word is spoken. Instead, an extended dance sequence with the two rival gangs sets a tense, sinister mood. The cast acts and reacts, tensing and releasing muscles, and expressing in movement what cannot be said.

Bernstein's score ranges from overtly popular to sophisticated and operatic. The West Side Story Concert Suite #2 contains four of the show’s well-known numbers. “I Feel Pretty” is a charming waltz sung by Maria, who is exhilarated by the dizzying emotions of her new love. A group of her friends join in and try to keep her feet on the ground but to no avail. Bernstein wrote this song in a traditional Broadway style and it would not be out of place in a show by Rogers and Hammerstein. The men then enter with “Jet Song,” full of the swagger and pride of a teenage gang staking out its turf. They squabble over a couple blocks of the neighborhood where both invaders and defenders insist, THEY started it! The music is in a cool, wrong-note jazz style. Nervous chords and saxophone melodies alternate with dance rhythms and the puff-chested manifestos of young punks:  “When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day. . .” “America” pits the dreamy longing of one Puerto Rican girl for her homeland against the sarcastic retorts of another who knows live is much better on a different island - Manhattan. All the women join in in this mixture of several Latin musical styles, which gives the score much of its Hispanic color. The final movement begins with more competitive proclamations by the two gangs. The tense, aggressive music is then masterfully woven in with Tony and Maria’s love song, “Tonight,” in an ensemble worthy of an experienced opera composer. Each member of the cast has a different expectation of the approaching night, but none imagines the tragedy that will follow.

Program notes by Arthur Post